So yes, Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo has it all, as author of not only several children’s books (yikes), and grim stand-alone crime novels, but 11, counting The Thirst, in a monstrously successful series led by Oslo police detective Harry Hole. According to Nesbo’s publishers, the series has sold more than 30 million copies in 48 languages world-wide.

And yet . . .

Perhaps it’s merely peevish, in the face of that pretty-well-earned success, to note that in books, movies, television and life itself, there are already more than enough tortured and tormented female victims, without any particular need for someone as able as Jo Nesbo to keep adding to their number.

But add he does in The Thirst, in grotesque and grisly detail.

By the time the puzzling string of murders begins, Harry Hole is in his late 40s and a reformed alcoholic.

He has moved on from the Oslo police force to teach investigative techniques and assorted other skills to police college students, including his stepson, Oleg.

He is actually revelling in domestic life with his wife, Rakel, astonished to be waking up in the morning feeling something like happy.

This is so, even though he has occasional nightmares of terrible screams, along with visions of a criminal with a chest tattooed with a horrific “demon” face, a murderer from his past.

And then a lawyer dies in her apartment, washed in blood, her throat ripped open by what must have been teeth of remarkable power.

In charge of the investigation is Detective Inspector Katerine Bratt, who previously worked with Harry and who is trying to gain the loyalty and respect of men, many of them resentful, of whom she’s now in command.

The murder is gory and strange enough to keep police busy conducting a traditional investigation, and also gory and strange enough to encourage Katerine to call on the reluctant Harry to pursue separately his own, less regular, trains of thought.

When there’s a similarly horrific killing of another woman, it starts to seem obvious the murderer has found his victims through the dating app Tinder — possibly a sensible warning of potential dangers to dating-app users in the real world.

In its almost-550 pages, though, The Thirst pays closest attention to what’s suggested by its title: vampirism.

Not vampires of story and myth, but vampirists: people — a man – who kills in order to drink the blood of his victims.Is that a thing? Probably.

But besides the detailed deprivations and tortures inflicted on victims, and the considerations of vampirism, Nesbo layers on, as his readers fully expect, character and subplot after character and sub-plot, from a mysteriously sickened wife to the machinations of a sleazily ambitious police chief.

Plots and relationships may, in their complex fashions, eventually resolve, but it’s clear that although Harry may in the beginning have experienced waking up happy, he’s been reminded, too, that happiness can be an unreliable, unstable state.

By the end, there are clues and hints he’ll be back digging into more traumatically violent crimes in future books.

It might, but shouldn’t be, too much to hope, though, that a writer of Nesbo’s gifts of depth and complexity will move on from the tortured women beloved of lesser imaginations and talents.